 | Manuscript Access through Standards for Electronic Records |
1. Introduction |
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This document describes an additional TEI element which may be used to encode rich textual descriptions of manuscript material of any kind. It is intended primarily for the detailed cataloguing of medieval and early modern manuscript materials in the Western European tradition, although we believe it to be more generally applicable.
Many people have contributed to the making of this encoding
scheme. It derives from a lengthy series of meetings carried out under various banners
in various places, over the last few years. In its present form, the
system documented here was produced as a major deliverable of the
MASTER (Manuscript Access through
Standardization of Electronic Records) project, funded by the
European Union Framework IV program from January 1999 to June 2001. As
well as determining its design, the Master project partners have also
tested out the scheme in earnest by cataloguing a significant number
of records from their own holdings, the results of which may be seen
at the project's online catalogue.
An article introducing the goals and
methods of the project was published in the French journal
From the start, the Master project has worked very closely with other projects engaged in the business of manuscript description, notably the EAMMSS and Digital Scriptorium projects in the USA. Representatives from those projects and from the TEI Workgroup on Manuscript Description attended and participated fully in all Master project meetings, and have thus also made a major contribution to the scheme described here.
This description assumes the availability of a number of standard TEI elements. Such elements, in particular their content and attributes, are not further discussed within this document, but reference to the appropriate section of the full TEI documentation is provided. Full documentation of the TEI scheme is available from http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/TEI/Guidelines/; a short introduction is available from http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/TEI/Lite/.
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Date: (revised 6 Jan 01) Author: Edited by Lou Burnard for the MASTER Work Group.
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